Dragon's Descent [Xianxia, Reverse Cultivation]

Tan Minzhi's hands swept through formation gestures, and the corrupted water around them writhed like living serpents. Three dark tendrils lashed toward Ming Lian from different angles—one high toward his throat, two low seeking his ankles—each trailing wisps of sickly vapor that burned the air where they passed.

Ming Lian's sword sang from its sheath, but his first cut betrayed years of careful restraint. The blade met the high tendril at a defensive angle, deflecting rather than severing, and corrupted essence splashed across his shoulder with a hiss of dissolving fabric. The acid ate through silk and leather, reaching skin that reddened and blistered on contact.

He hissed in pain and stumbled backward, which put him directly in the path of the ankle strikes. One tendril wrapped around his left leg like a constricting serpent, its touch sending numbness racing up toward his hip. The other caught his sword arm just below the elbow, and Ming Lian felt spiritual poison seeping through his sleeve toward his meridians.

Too defensive. Always too defensive.

He twisted free with desperate strength, but more tendrils were already rising from the pool—five, then seven, then too many to count. His movements followed patterns drilled into him during thousands of practice sessions, technically correct and safely conservative, but completely inadequate against opponents who fought to kill rather than score points in tournaments.

Xiaolong remained where she stood, hands clasped behind her back, watching the Black Dao cultivators with the polite attention one might give to street performers juggling knives.

Chen Rui noticed her apparent calm and mistook restraint for vulnerability.

"Song Lin," he barked without taking his eyes off Ming Lian's increasingly desperate defense, "handle the woman. We don't need complications while we finish this one."

Song Lin's grin revealed teeth stained black with corrupted essence as he peeled away from their triangular formation. Spiritual energy coiled around his hands like smoke, condensing into binding chains that clinked with metallic resonance as he approached Xiaolong's flank.

She turned her head slightly, tracking his movement with the mild interest of someone watching clouds drift past.

"Some people," she said conversationally, her voice carrying clearly across the clearing, "spend so much energy avoiding failure that they forget how to achieve success."

The binding chains shot forward with whistling speed, their spiritual weight heavy enough to crack stone. They wrapped around the space where Xiaolong had been standing—but she was no longer there. A shift of weight so minimal it barely qualified as movement had carried her exactly one foot to the right.

"Curious technique," she observed, watching the chains fall slack against empty air. "All that power, but no commitment to actually connecting with the target."

Song Lin's face darkened. This time he formed three separate chains, each one crackling with dark energy as he launched them in overlapping arcs designed to cut off any possible escape route. The air filled with metallic shrieks as spiritual binding techniques sought their quarry.

Xiaolong examined her fingernails with scholarly attention. She leaned back perhaps an inch, raised her left shoulder a fraction, and tilted her head. All three chains passed through empty air, missing by margins that could have been calculated with geometric instruments.

"The fear of missing," she continued as if discussing afternoon weather, "often guarantees the very failure one seeks to avoid."

Ming Lian heard her words even as he fought his own losing battle. A tendril had wrapped around his wrist, its grip tightening like a noose while others struck at his torso from multiple angles. He deflected two, dodged a third, but the fourth caught him across the ribs with claws of crystallized corruption that tore through his robes and left burning furrows in his flesh.

Commitment. When had he last truly committed to anything? When had he stopped pulling his punches, holding back that final measure of effort that might—just might—be enough?

Another tendril slipped past his guard, its tip aimed directly at his heart. This time he didn't deflect—he stepped forward into the attack, letting it slide past his ribs by inches while driving his blade deep into its core. The corrupted essence unraveled with a shriek of dissolving malice, and for the first time since the fight began, Ming Lian pressed his advantage instead of consolidating his defense.

But the moment of breakthrough cost him.

While he was focused on destroying one tendril, three others struck from his blind spots. One caught his ankle and yanked him off balance. Another wrapped around his throat, squeezing until black spots danced at the edges of his vision. The third drove straight toward his exposed back like a spear of liquid malevolence.

Song Lin snarled and drew his sword, abandoning technique for direct assault. The blade's edge gleamed with corrupted water essence as he crossed the distance in three explosive steps, steel descending toward Xiaolong's shoulder in a strike meant to separate bone from bone.

Xiaolong caught his wrist between her thumb and forefinger.

The impact sent shockwaves up Song Lin's arm. His fingers went instantly numb, the sword spinning from his grip to embed itself point-first in the earth ten paces away. The blade quivered like a struck tuning fork while Song Lin stared at his own hand as if it belonged to someone else.

"Persistence without wisdom," she said, her voice carrying across the clearing to Ming Lian's struggling ears, "is merely repeated failure. But persistence with understanding..." She released Song Lin's wrist with casual dismissal. "Now that has potential."

Song Lin stumbled backward, cradling his arm against his chest and staring at her with the expression of a man who had just tried to intimidate a mountain. His entire spiritual circulation had been disrupted by that single, gentle contact—not damaged, but thoroughly scrambled.

Ming Lian felt something shift inside his chest as he fought free from the tendril around his throat. Understanding. She wasn't just defending herself—she was teaching him, showing him what commitment looked like when backed by genuine capability rather than desperate hope.

The lesson came almost too late. Tan Minzhi had used Ming Lian's momentary distraction to weave a killing technique—a spear of crystallized corruption that screamed through the air toward his exposed back, its point wreathed in essence that would eat through flesh and bone like acid.

Years of trained reflexes saved him. He spun, blade rising to intercept, but the defensive movement was pure muscle memory with no thought behind it. The sort of technique that would turn aside a practice weapon but shatter against genuine killing intent.

The spear punched through his guard like paper. Pain exploded across his ribs as corrupted essence carved through flesh and began eating toward his meridians. He stumbled, spiritual circulation disrupted, and tasted blood as internal injuries multiplied.

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Not good enough. Never good enough.

"Yield now," Tan Minzhi called, already forming another spear with one hand while maintaining his tendril attacks with the other, "and we might let you live to warn your sect about their inadequate training methods."

The taunt struck home because it echoed his own fears. Maybe he really wasn't good enough. Maybe years of self-limitation had atrophied capabilities that had never been as strong as others believed.

Chen Rui, seeing Song Lin's failure, abandoned his support role to launch his own assault. His hands shaped a construct of twisted water—five grasping claws that left smoking trails in the air as they converged on Ming Lian's position from multiple angles.

But Ming Lian was trapped between attacks now. Tan Minzhi's tendrils held him in place while the corruption spear had left him weak and bleeding. He couldn't dodge Chen Rui's claws, couldn't block them all, couldn't—

One claw caught him across the chest, its talons raking flesh that was already torn and bleeding. Another wrapped around his sword arm, squeezing until he felt bones grind together. The third struck his left thigh, dropping him to one knee as spiritual poison raced through his leg.

He was losing. Worse than losing—he was being humiliated, cut apart by enemies who fought with techniques stolen from his own sect.

Song Lin had retrieved his sword and was circling wide, apparently planning to attack Xiaolong from behind while she was distracted. His movements were careful now, respectful of her capabilities but determined to contribute something to the battle.

"Some challenges," Xiaolong mused, shifting her weight to track Song Lin's approach without appearing to watch him directly, "cannot be overcome through individual effort alone."

Song Lin lunged, this time incorporating his spiritual energy into multiple overlapping illusions. Seven identical Song Lins materialized, each one solid and threatening, their blades catching moonlight as they converged on her position from different vectors.

Xiaolong closed her eyes and took one small step to the left.

Six illusory swords passed through empty air with whispers of displaced wind. The seventh—the real one—missed her by the width of a silk thread as Song Lin's momentum carried him past her position and directly into the massive oak she'd been standing beside.

The impact made a sound like a melon dropped from a great height. Song Lin's sword embedded itself in bark with a solid thunk, its blade sinking three inches deep and vibrating like a struck bell. Its owner slid down the trunk to sit in a dazed heap among the tree's roots, his eyes unfocused and a thin line of blood trickling from his forehead.

"But working together," Xiaolong continued as if nothing had interrupted her observation, "often reveals solutions that individual strength cannot achieve."

Ming Lian heard her words just as Chen Rui's claws tightened their grip, threatening to crush his sword arm entirely. Working together. But he was alone here, wasn't he? Xiaolong had promised not to interfere, and he had to prove he could handle this himself.

Except... he wasn't really alone. Was he?

The water around them—even corrupted, even poisoned—still remembered its original nature. The techniques his enemies used were stolen from Azure Waters principles, which meant they retained echoes of their pure forms. And the corruption itself created instabilities that a skilled practitioner could exploit.

Maybe he couldn't overpower them. But maybe he could turn their own techniques against them.

Instead of fighting Chen Rui's grasping claws, Ming Lian began tracing their spiritual signature with his fingertips, following the corrupted energy back to its source. The technique burned his hands, sent poison racing through his meridians, but he held on and started to understand the underlying structure.

"What are you doing?" Chen Rui demanded, pouring more power into his construct to break Ming Lian's concentration.

Ming Lian smiled through bloody teeth. "Learning."

His spiritual energy flowed into the claws, not to purify them but to map their internal contradictions. Every stolen technique revealed flaws where the original form had been imperfectly copied. Every corruption showed stress points where unnatural forces strained against water's essential nature.

And once he understood those weaknesses...

He began unweaving the technique from the inside.

One claw dissolved into ordinary water that splashed harmlessly against the ground. The feedback disrupted Chen Rui's concentration, sending wild energies ricocheting through his spiritual circulation. The remaining claws loosened their grip as their creator struggled to maintain control.

But the effort cost Ming Lian dearly. The corruption in his system flared in response to his technique, eating deeper into his meridians. His vision blurred as poison reached his spiritual core, and he felt his cultivation base wavering like a candle in strong wind.

Zhao Shen pushed himself upright, black water dripping from his hair and robes, and tried a different approach. He approached Xiaolong with more caution than Song Lin had shown, his hands weaving through the opening gestures of a technique designed to overwhelm through sheer volume. Spiritual pressure built around him like gathering storm clouds, crackling with barely contained energy.

"When facing an immovable obstacle," Xiaolong said, her voice carrying clearly across the clearing as she noted his approach, "some people keep pushing harder rather than finding a way around."

She glanced toward where Ming Lian was struggling against increasingly desperate odds, his face pale with blood loss and spiritual poisoning.

"But the wise cultivator learns that sometimes the solution isn't more force—it's different force. Not harder, but smarter. Not stronger, but more... flexible."

"Stay out of this," Zhao Shen commanded, power crackling around his clenched fists. "Or I'll—"

Xiaolong sneezed—a tiny, delicate sound.

The motion was tiny—a barely perceptible jerk of her head—but it came at the exact moment Zhao Shen's technique required perfect balance to complete its formation. A gust of displaced air caught the hem of his robes and shifted his footing

The shift was enough. His spiritual energy scattered like startled birds as the complex formation collapsed mid-casting. He stumbled sideways, arms windmilling as he tried to recover, and his desperate grab for a tree branch ended with both him and a large piece of bark tumbling face-first into a puddle of the corrupted water he'd been so carefully avoiding.

"Apologies," Xiaolong said with perfect sincerity, dabbing at her nose with one sleeve. "The pollen this season is dreadful."

Zhao Shen pushed himself upright again, now thoroughly soaked and furious. This time, he abandoned finesse entirely in favor of raw spiritual pressure—a crushing wave of energy designed to flatten anything in its path through brute force alone.

"Maximum effort approaches," Xiaolong observed mildly, "often produce minimum results when applied without understanding."

The pressure wave hit her like a river hitting a boulder—which is to say, it parted around her without disturbing so much as a single thread of her robes, while Zhao Shen's own circulation recoiled from the backlash of attacking something fundamentally immovable.

Without looking at Zhao Shen directly, she extended one finger and tapped the air beside her head.

A thunderclap echoed across the clearing. The blade of Zhao Shen's sword, still sheathed at his side, separated completely from its hilt and rocketed backward to embed itself three feet deep in an elm tree twenty paces away. When the ringing died down, the faint sound of the grip, with pommel and guard still attached, rolling in the grass could be heard.

"Finesse," Xiaolong said conversationally, "is often overlooked in a world that prefers brute force."

Zhao Shen stared at his empty scabbard, then at the sword blade protruding from distant bark, then at his scabbard again. His face cycled through confusion, disbelief, and growing terror as the implications registered.

"Chen Rui!" he called urgently as his spiritual pressure attack began dissipating harmlessly around Xiaolong's unmoved form. "We need to reassess this situation! That woman isn't what she appears!"

But Chen Rui was fighting for his life against Ming Lian's unexpected technique analysis, his grasping claws dissolving one by one as their internal contradictions were exploited. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he struggled to maintain constructs that were being systematically unraveled from within.

"Song Lin!" Zhao Shen tried desperately. "We need support!"

But Song Lin was still sitting dazed at the base of the oak tree, occasionally making confused sounds as he tried to remember how many fingers he was supposed to have.

"Ah," Zhao Shen said in a very small voice, and then, with more feeling, "Damn."

"An excellent idea," Xiaolong remarked. "Though, if I might offer some constructive advice—" Her attention flickered toward him for less than half a heartbeat, her eyes flashing violet and silver, then refocused on Ming Lian. "—your technique would benefit greatly from less profanity and more practice."